I had a great day today reconnecting with Constant Contact. That’s a major long-time vendor for email marketing services, and I was one of their very first dealers back in 2003. In fact it was not even called Constant Contact back then – it was called Roving Software.   It has been interesting to see this company steadily grow.  They make email marketing pretty easy for users on many levels.

If you can only do wizard driven templates with the art work built in – they do that. If you are a slick HTML person you can customize your campaigns to a very fine detail.  It is easy to manipulate your database into multiple categories. And since my company, IMS Strategic Internet Marketing Services is again an active dealer I can throw in a free trial…

Re-establishing my dealer account took some doing.

In about 2005  I was elected to serve as the Chief Executive Officer of Pinnacle Wireless LLC, DBA Atrius.  At that time I converted my existing dealer agreement with Constant Contact  for use by Pinnacle/Atrius  which included an extensive personal contact database.  During my tenure, most Pinnacle/Atrius  Customers were added to this master database.  I have long since left Pinnacle/Atrius  and recently launched IMS Internet Marketing Services. So here is the problem – there is no practical way for me to distinguish between my original personal contact list, and names added later for use by Pinnacle/Atrius.

There were almost 5000 names in there that may or may not want to do business with me… and although most of them were probably dial up customers and have no need for an Internet Marketing company like IMS – if only 10% did hold some interest … well that would be more customers than I could handle at the current size of the company. Not a bad problem to have.

The other problem is that my company provides high level email marketing consulting and one of the cardinal rules is:

“It’s Not The Technology – It’s The Relationship”.

So yes technically, I could  send out 5000 emails tonight shamelessly asking former Atrius clients for business – but not only is that by definition “SPAM” – it would really tick off a lot of people – not the least of whom are the other owners of that company.

I solved it by changing the dealer account status into a  Confirmed Opt-in (a.k.a. double opt-in) which is the most rigorous method of obtaining permission to send email communications. It requires the contact (email address owner) to affirmatively respond to an email confirmation request in order to be added to an email list. If the contact does not affirmatively respond, he or she will not receive any further email communications from you.

I give a little more back ground and some pointers in this, the tenth episode of the Web Strategies Podcast.

I am also featuring our new theme song- Westward Leaning – enjoy!